<rant offensiveness="uncompromising">

Feeling really pissed off right now. I just put IE PC back into standards mode by removing the XML prolog from all of the pages of this site, only to see my vertically centered content disappear to the top of the window.

How can any system claim to be a complete design tool when it’s concept of space is so wildly schizophrenic (it’s some paper, it’s a window, it looks crap whatever media you choose)? Because nobody responsible for thinking it up was a designer, that’s how.

I’ve been reading some of the extracts from Eric Meyer’s Eric Meyer on CSS. Eric is one of the WG as well. His page is bullshit, I’m sorry, I’m sure he’s a great guy and everything and he has certainly been a key player in getting us to the situation we’re at now. However, all he does is bang on about how CSS is God’s gift to designers. He demonstrates this with a series of lacklustre designs that clearly originate from the bottom up. Then, in one example that does look vaguely nice, his demo copy is a thinly veiled attack on “pretentious” designers! Aaargh! It makes me livid.

These people are taking the web back to the days when we were all hacking tables to do cool stuff. They’ve written crap specs so that we’re all forced to buy their books or pour through vast tutorials telling us how to make ugly pages we don’t want!

Designers work top-down and while there are no people producing layouts in Illustrator and feeding them to the community, web design is fucked. Adoption of XHTML and CSS layout is not going to happen. I’m even considering putting my prologs back in and perhaps dropping back to XHTML transitional or even HTML 4.

As a side note. I briefly went looking for the origins of the tables bad mantra. It seems to me that it’s a semantic point raised in passing in the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. That’s it. Tables aren’t accessible so web designers should be deprived of their most expressive tool and not given a replacement. Cunts!

The more I think about this the more I think that the way forward is to bring tables right on back again, but in the way I outlined earlier. Create a new set of syntax starting with some display properties called grid or something and implement them in CSS3. Examine why authors are using tables and provide them with a better alternative, instead of telling them they suck because blind people don’t get design. That’s never been an issue in any other market, where design is vital to performance, so why should poor beleagured web authors be crapped on by a standards body that’s out of touch with reality?

</rant>